What Is a Supplementary Application? Ontario 2027 Guide

A supplementary application (“supp app”) is anything a university program asks you for beyond your OUAC application and your marks. Some programs want a form about your activities, some want written answers on a clock, some want you on camera. If you are in grade 12 and have just heard the phrase for the first time, this page is the plain answer: what a supp app is, who needs one, what the three formats are, what OUAC does and doesn’t collect, and when each one is due for Fall 2027 entry.

By the AcceptMe team 8 min read Updated

The one-sentence version

OUAC sends a university your program choices and your grades. That is all it sends. A program that gets far more qualified applicants than it has seats adds a second step to see the things a transcript can’t show: what you have done outside class, how you write when you can’t revise, and how you talk. That second step is the supplementary application. Students shorten it to “supp app”; Waterloo calls its version the AIF; Ivey, Schulich and Rotman use “supplemental”; McMaster Health Sci just says “the supp.” Same idea every time.

If a program has a supp app, it is not optional in any practical sense. Several Ontario programs say in writing that an application without the supplementary piece is not considered at all. Your top 6 gets you looked at; the supp app decides whether you get in.

What OUAC collects, and what it doesn’t

If you are a full-time student at an Ontario high school, you apply through the OUAC 101 application (OUAC’s site has started calling it “Group A,” but every student and counsellor still says 101). Everyone else, including students in other provinces and people who graduated already, uses the 105. The 101 form collects your name, your school, your program choices in order, and nothing about you as a person. Your grades go from your school board to OUAC to the universities automatically: grade 11 finals and grade 12 midterms in the fall, then updates through the spring.

There is no activities section on the 101. No essay. No references. That surprises students every year, because the UBC application (and every American one) has all of that built in. In Ontario the personal layer lives entirely inside each program’s supp app, and each program runs its own, on its own platform, with its own deadline.

The dates and fees for Fall 2027 entry, as OUAC publishes them: the application deadline for equal consideration is January 15, 2027; universities receive everything submitted by then around January 21; no Ontario university can make you accept or pay a deposit before June 1, 2027. The base fee covers three program choices and each extra choice costs more (OUAC listed $159 plus $51 per additional choice as the tentative 2027 amounts). Confirm both on OUAC’s deadlines page and fees page. Note the wording on the deadlines page: program and supplementary deadlines “can be earlier or later.” Several are earlier.

The three formats

1. A form or profile, written at your own pace

Activities, awards, short answers with a word or character cap, sometimes references who get contacted. Waterloo’s AIF is five questions at 150 words each. Ivey’s AEO wants two 500-word essays and up to seven activities with a named reference for each. McMaster Health Sci is two or three answers at 1,500 characters, graded blind. U of T Computer Science asks you to answer three of four questions at 250 words. Nobody times you, which means the quality bar is high: a thin answer here was a choice.

2. Timed written answers

A question you haven’t seen appears, a clock starts, you type, and the answer submits when the clock stops. Queen’s gives ten minutes. Schulich gives five minutes and 350 words. U of T Engineering gives ten minutes and 300 words. McMaster Engineering gives seven minutes. You can’t revise afterwards, so what is being tested is whether you can decide a point in the first minute and write straight through.

3. Recorded video answers

A question appears, a prep timer runs (anything from 10 seconds at McMaster Engineering to two minutes at Queen’s), the camera starts by itself, an answer timer runs, and that is your take. Most Ontario programs host this on Kira Talent, so the interface is the same at Ivey, Rotman, Schulich, Queen’s and McMaster; only the timings and the question count change. Kira has a practice mode that teaches you the buttons. It does not give you unseen questions on a clock, which is the actual skill. The Kira interview practice guide covers retakes, notes, and what schools say they score.

A fourth thing, Casper, sits slightly apart: a situational judgement test run by an outside company, booked on a fixed test date, used by Western Engineering and by several nursing programs. It has a guide of its own for Western Engineering and for nursing.

Which programs have one

This is the list you need in October while you build the OUAC form. Every program below has its own guide with the exact questions, timings and the official page.

Not on the list: most Arts and Science programs at every Ontario university, Queen’s Engineering, York’s Lassonde Engineering, and nearly everything at Guelph, Ottawa and Carleton. The no-supp-app guide is the full table.

Fees, early consideration, and the two clocks

Three things about supp apps catch students out in their first cycle.

Some cost money. Rotman charges $52, McMaster Engineering $50, and Schulich adds a $50 fee starting with the Fall 2027 cycle; all three are paid through OUAC when you add the program. Casper has its own test fee. So an ambitious list of six business and engineering programs can run to a few hundred dollars on top of the OUAC fee. Budget for it in October, not in January.

Early consideration is not the deadline, but it is not nothing. Schulich (November 23, 2026), Rotman and U of T Engineering (December 1, 2026) and McMaster Engineering (November 26, 2026, “recommended”) all publish a date well before the final one. Submitting by it puts you in the first review round, and for programs that make offers in waves that can mean a December offer instead of a May one. Schulich states that later submissions are still considered, just later in the cycle. The trade is the quality of what you submit: an early rushed supp app is worse than a February good one.

There are two clocks, and they don’t match. January 15 is the OUAC clock. Each supp app runs on its own: Ivey the same day, McMaster Engineering January 28, most others February 1 or February 15, and UTSC Management on a personal deadline set from the day you applied. The deadlines calendar puts every one of them in month order for Fall 2027 entry.

What they are actually asking

Read the questions across all of these programs and the same handful of things keep showing up: a time you led without a title, a time a team disagreed, a setback and what you did the next day, something you started, why this program. The wrappers differ. The stories don’t. A student with six honest stories, each with a situation, a decision, a number in the result and one sentence of reflection, can answer every supp app in Ontario. The guide to the STAR method shows the shape.

The stories don’t need to be big. A supp app reader has seen a thousand student council presidents. What they have not seen is your Saturday shift at the pharmacy and the thing you changed about how the returns shelf worked. If your EC list looks thin, the no-ECs guide is written for exactly that worry, and it is a far more common one than you would guess.

Where to go from here

If you want to know how much any of this counts against your top 6, the how-much-does-it-matter guide goes program by program through what each school publishes about weighting, and where your prep hours actually move the needle. If you are building your OUAC list this week and want to know which strong programs admit on grades alone, the no-supp-app table will settle it in five minutes. If someone in your house has already suggested letting ChatGPT draft the answers, read the AI and supp apps guide first: it explains what each university says, and why students who wrote every word themselves still get flagged. If you are applying from BC, the OUAC 105 guide explains how the Ontario supplementaries and deadlines differ from UBC’s. Then find out what a timed answer feels like before it counts: AcceptMe’s custom interviews will put an unseen question in front of you with a prep window and an answer clock you set to match any program above, and hand you the transcript with the coach’s notes on what you said.

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